can i reboot my pc with a external disc drive because my internal one does not work thanks?

Question

and also any idea why my two internal disc drives do not work i just purched a new one put it in the pc then when i put a disc in nothing happens any idears on the two questions thanks for your time

Answer 1

Sure - assuming your BIOS supports it.

Does your BIOS detect & support the drives you have recently put in? They may be too large, or you might not have set the jumpers correctly.

Answer 2

Yes you can boot your pc with a external drive, when the pc starts up, go to the BIOS or CMOS (most pc's you press del or ctrl alt s ) in the boot up drive option, input the letter of the drive you want to boot up with, and it will boot up ( mind you, you have to have an operating system on the external disk or at least a MS-startup disk ( you can make one in windows 98 through control panel- add remove programs- startup disk)- This is for all Microsoft operating systems.

Please give more info about whats hapening when you boot with your internal drives so we might be able to provide some assistance.

Answer 3

Try pulling the new one out and see if it works again.

If so, then you probably need to set the jumper on the new drive to 'slave' so that it doesn't interfere with the main drive.

Also, when the computer boots it should tell you how to get into BIOS (usually by pressing del. or something), go in and make sure that it is auto-configuring your drive, or change it manually.

Some older machines can only handle drives up to a certain size - you might be able to use a bigger drive, but you will be limited to the space that the computer is capable of using.

Answer 4

well it depends on how u connected the cables, and what jumpers you set since the jumpers should be set the following 1 drive should be master and 1 shuold be slave this is if your using ide
as for the first part of your question u would need to be able to change the boot sequence to usb. and that will allow u to boot from external hard drive.

Answer 5

Hi, the most likely reason why your hard drives have stopped working, is you have most proberly set jumpers as master, one them has to be set as slave.

The question about booting your computer, is yes you can use the windows CD pop this in your CD drive before your start your computer and use the option to start up in command prompt.

Hope this helps

Answer 6

Yes, you can boot your pc with an external disc drive. And the reason your new disc drive isn'tworking is probably because the drivers for them haven't been installed yet.